Siss is just a regular girl (not sure if her age is ever stated explicitly, but I think we are to assume around eleven or twelve) in the frozen Arctic wastes of rural Norway, just trying to get through the day without falling into a fjord and freezing to death, getting trampled to death by a moose or dying after eating some tainted rakfisk.
Siss is a popular and influential girl at school and so when a new girl, Unn, arrives, the class look to her for a definitive thumbs up or down. Siss is intrigued by Unn - quiet, reserved, very happy to be in her own company at break-times and not mingle much with her contemporaries - and arranges a visit to her house after school to get better acquainted.
The visit offers further intrigue - Unn has come to live with her aunt after her mother's death, her father being absent long since and known to Unn only through a couple of old photographs. Unn also alludes vaguely to some dark secret, the details of which she keeps to herself but which she imagines may be visible to Siss in some way after they undress in front of each other (what, you mean you don't do this on a first visit to someone's house). Siss is made a little uncomfortable by all this but the two make a promise to be BFFs before Siss heads home.
Unn herself is a bit spooked by the intensity of this first meeting and decides to bunk off school the next day to avoid the awkwardness of having to meet Siss in front of everyone else. Luckily it's midwinter and there are lots of icy delights to explore, notably a frozen lake and, near its outflow, a spectacular frozen waterfall that the locals call the Ice Palace. Unn ventures into the ice palace, mesmerised by its weird beauty and the unearthly creaking and cracking noises that it makes. But the constant thawing, cracking, dripping and re-freezing mean that the ice palace is constantly re-shaping itself, and where there is beauty there is also danger.
Siss is surprised by Unn's absence from school, and heads for her aunt's house to check on her, only to find that Auntie hasn't seen her either. The alarm is raised and a search commences, including the lake and the ice palace, but no trace of Unn can be found.
Obviously life goes on, for everyone else anyway, and Siss' schoolfriends want to welcome her back into their group, But Siss is mindful of her promise to Unn and keeps to herself, fiercely guarding Unn's empty desk against anyone wanting to re-use it. But where does it end? It's increasingly obvious to everyone, even as they diligently continue searching, that Unn isn't coming back.
Springtime arrives and things start to warm up - relatively speaking anyway, it's still Norway - and the lake ice starts to thaw. Unn's aunt decides to sell up and move away, and encourages Siss to move on with her life and set aside her promise to Unn. And so Siss and her schoolfriends make a final trip to see the ice palace before its eventual inevitable collapse.
The Ice Palace tells a pretty simple story in a stark, understated way. The central metaphor is pretty straightforward - the chilly hardness and subsequent thawing of the waterfall being echoed by Siss' coldness towards her friends in the aftermath of Unn's disappearance and her eventual re-acceptance into the group. There is some deeper, darker stuff going on as well, though - Unn's dark secret is never revealed, and there are some hints of burgeoning pre-teenage sexuality both in Siss and Unn's charged first encounter at Auntie's house and in Siss' tentative friendship with the boy who seems to have become a leader of the group of schoolfriends in Siss' absence. And it's never completely clear what's happened to Unn - we assume she's frozen to death and been entombed within the shifting walls of the ice palace, but if that's true then at some point during the spring thaw her semi-frozen corpse should slurp out of the ice and spoil someone's picnic. Maybe she will just be washed away with the collapsed remnants of the ice palace and never be found.
There's always an interesting contrast involved in following a pretty long book with a very short one - The Overstory had lots of characters, lots of digressions into arcane bits of tree-related lore, peaks and troughs in terms of the relevance of what's currently going on to the perceived main thread of the narrative, and no desire to coyly allude to things where devoting a whole chapter to them will do instead; The Ice Palace has none of that, being all told from Siss' point of view except for the chapter where Unn ventures into the ice palace, and with pretty much nothing in terms of fat on the bones and certainly no desire to explain itself beyond the ruthlessly-imposed bounds of the story it sets out to tell. None of that is a value judgment, it's just interesting. I enjoyed The Ice Palace very much, and it certainly passes the "lingers oddly in the mind" test that I mentioned here and here, and the "interesting short novel that's probably ideal film material" test that I mentioned here, here and here. And sure enough it was filmed in 1987 - what appears to be the complete movie is available on YouTube here.
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